The BBC's plans to recruit scores of new entrants for paid apprenticeships, in numbers deliberately above those it needs internally, rolled out at last week's Apprenticeships and the Media event at Broadcasting House, is part of a desperately needed and belated attempt to improve the supply of well-trained staff in the UK TV industry.

But the BBC's initiative is not enough, and could allow the large independent producers to partly dodge their responsibilities. The BBC scheme will rely on a licence fee subsidy to get started: the BBC Academy will supply the administration, and independents just pay for the specific amount of time they employ apprentices on a programme.

But even with so much of the financial burden lifted, the BBC is uncertain whether independents will be prepared to join the scheme.

The Broadcasting House conference also heard practical business advice from BT, which starts its apprentices on half the salary of the post the company is training for, rising by 10% annually, and has found that its trained staff are worth £1,300 per annum more to the company than untrained ones.

To be fair, some big independent producers are offering their own training. A Shine-backed scheme, The Hatch, run by ex-producer Ben Hall, has 10 young people, three from children's homes, on its first programme, with a year's paid contract. They have been picked partly on the basis of their gutsy questions during a three-day assessment, not past education. Hall is looking for aspirational people with the "fourth sense", to make and create programmes. It's a long way from simply making cups of tea.

But the production sector divides dramatically between super indies such as Shine and small enterprises, employing 10 staff or less. Though the issue was raised, the BBC conference ducked out of a proper debate about tackling exploitation head on, despite half of the respondents to that Skillset survey reporting they had worked unpaid. The one agreement was over unpaid work experience, lasting two weeks – judged fair enough – and unpaid work, lasting months and months – which was felt to be wrong.

A BBC entertainment executive, Kate Phillips, who mentors apprentices, and confessed to private education, a university degree and parents who supported her when she started out, was rooting for changes. Her plea, which has so far fallen on deaf ears, was to change BBC application forms, to put the section on education and qualifications further down. For mixed up in this is the push for greater social diversity and a broader recruitment pool, and the big worry is that fresh ideas to connect with young audience will not percolate through the current TV production hierarchy.

But one obvious blind spot is that the broadcasters can do more to shape the ecology of the industry, since they fund programmes but are in the business of continually cutting budgets. Broadcasters could write into contracts that unpaid labour will not be tolerated and devise budgets to cut the temptation to rely on untrained staff. They could run anonymous hotlines to report bad practice. And why shouldn't independent producers pay into a central training scheme, not just expect to enjoy the upsides of someone else doing it?

People working in television are plagued by a lack of security because of short-term contracts. It probably doesn't matter when you are looking for alternatives to university and all that debt. But even a BBC apprenticeship is a different career prospect to landing a BT apprenticeship, because of the short-term contracts that are the norm in TV production.